Essentially a sports film, about a high-school basketball team on which one of the players just happens to be a werewolf (and several conspicuous inches taller than when he is not a werewolf). The ability to slam-dunk, to dribble between one's legs, to pass behind one's back, adds little to …
The narrators, Gene Kelly, Sammy Davis Jr., Mikhail Baryshnikov (on ballet only), Ray Bolger, Liza Minnelli, Gene Kelly again, feel a little too free to talk over the film clips, as if dance numbers only had to be seen and not heard. And it would have been nice once in …
Is there any reason why a movie about hyper youth must be hyper itself? So many pranks, so many speeding cars, so many fights: at a bowling alley, at a school dance, at a pool hall (a gunfight, no less), at a traffic stop, at a friend's house, at one's …
The idea of a crime-fighter being as vicious, mean, and nasty as the criminals he fights is as old as the coinage of "hard-boiled." What perhaps has changed a little is the attitude towards him, the withholding of any assurance that such methods are justified by their ends (cf. Dirty …
A low-budget pastiche (some will say rip-off, and let it go at that) of Blade Runner and The Terminator, primarily, with smaller bits of Rabid and Scanners and who-knows-what. But The Terminator, remember, was sued by somebody for copying the idea of a soldier from the future sent back to …
Rationalist view of werewolves, vampires, the Mummy, and Frankenstein's monster. That description might sound unduly serious, but not unduly unfunny. Hard-working, brain-racking, and to little avail. Ed Begley, Jr., Jeff Goldblum, Joseph Bologna, Michael Richards, Jeffrey Jones, John Byner, Carol Kane, Geena Davis -- everyone has his or her moments …
Little enough has been done to liberate Horton Foote's Golden Age teleplay from its staginess. Nothing at all has been done to update the piece, and if it weren't for the period production (a trifle over-fussy, in fact) and the sharply-etched photography of Fred Murphy, there might be a feeling …
Another of Alan Rudolph's exercises in attitude and posture, or in other words in coolness and nonchalance. These are paraded this time in and around the settings and trappings of the film noir, chiefly in and around Wanda's Cafe (Genevieve Bujold doesn't look or talk much like a Wanda — …
A graffiti guerrilla undermines the New York mayor's "Polish the Big Apple" re-election campaign. He has justice, and the entire populace, on his side, too; and the chipper, Irish-accented background music tugs us back to the heyday of Ford, Capra, and McCarey. But the whole thing is a bit flat, …
A very sweet (a little too, no doubt, for some tastes) adaptation of the Russell Hoban novel, directed by John Irvin, from a script by Harold Pinter. A relationship between a man and a woman that's founded on nothing but their mutual desire to liberate three sea turtles after thirty …
Colin Welland's original script has been shifted from industrial Britain to Seattle, Wash., and with only minor signs of strain. (He would not likely make the same mistake about the local British football team that he makes about the American: no rabid Seahawks fan, as Gene Hackman is cracked up …
The umpteenth or so 007 adventure -- but who's counting? Whoever is, will probably also know, among other trivia, whether or not the standard announcement in the closing credits that "James Bond Will Return" has ever before been made without an accompanying title. The title here, scraped up like those …
A high-school wrestler, hungry for a personal challenge, undertakes a debilitating training program to shave off twenty-two pounds and enable him to face the most feared wrestler in the state (who trains for his matches by running up and down the stadium bleachers with a log on his shoulders). The …
A cut-rate Andromeda Strain, but still serviceable, about a germ-warfare experiment (under cover of agronomics) that infects everyone in the laboratory and turns them on their fellows in homicidal rage -- everyone, that is, except the security monitor and wife of the local constable. Why is she immune? The answer …
Weird isn't the word for it. Two nerdy teenagers with a home computer at their disposal feed into it some specifications for an Ideal Female, then tap into a more powerful system, and — shazam! — conjure up Kelly Le Brock of The Woman in Red. She is at their …